The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

As I watch the beginning of this year’s hockey playoffs, like all good Canadians do, I wonder what type of team you need to win in the restaurant business.

We all know what type of employees we want, great sellers, hard workers, team members that care about your business, but how many of these good employees do you really have? Having all employees would be nice but in reality, most restaurant owners or managers deem approximately 45% of their employees, to be “good”

When I look at the “average” employees that surround me in my restaurants I usually see an employee at one time who was very good. During our weekly manager meeting, we identify these employees that are not in a good place. The three reasons that always come up for a down slide of a good employee are Attitude, Training and poor employees. The poor employees can easily be indentified (usually by your guests) and are bringing your good employees down. They create tension, disagreements, low employee morale and waste a lot of time for good managers.

To operate a great restaurant you have two options with your poor employees, help them improve or move them out. You will instantly find that several of your average employee’s will become good again. Then you can focus your time in being productive with your team, training, coaching, creating a great team work environment that can be felt by every guest.

A lot of employees lose their good ways based on how they are managed. They are not held accountable for their responsibilities, never shown the proper way to perform their job and do not receive much needed feedback or coaching from managers. If you want to drive sales and improve the bottom line, do it through your team. Hold them accountable through daily checklists, hold regular one on one sit downs with them to go over their strengths and weaknesses, obtain guest feedback on their performance through secret shopping or guest surveys and finally coach them on how to perform and show them how much you care by handling and removing issues that hold them back.